The most common reason has been to assure stakeholders—employees, investors, customers—that the company takes environmental and social matters seriously and acts responsibly.
The Center uses its own index based loosely on the widely adopted reporting guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and aspects of the ISO14000 Environmental Management Standard to score and rank companies within industrial sectors, and assign letter grades.
The Center ranks companies and assigns letter grades for their for overall quality of reporting, based entirely on material released on the firms’ Web sites.
These detailed analyses reveal what social and environmental themes companies perceive to be most important to the American public today.
All sector reports are available for free download[5][6] Roberts Center publications assert that large and small organizations can gain by adopting a strong vision of sustainability, publicizing it, and systematically working to improve—no matter what a company's current level of performance is.